How To Engage Anonymous Online Visitors

Marketing, sales, and data go hand in hand. Analyzing your results and comparing it to the effort you’ve put into your work is crucial for progress. But do you analyze all aspects of your business?

What if I tell you that over 98% of online visitors remain anonymous. This is a huge amount of people that never truly engage with your business, isn’t it? If you think you cannot ignore this fact anymore, read on and see how you can change that.

According to CEB, 57% of the decision-making process is finished before the customer ever contacts the business. This means you need some disruptive insights to help you provoke their interest and engage them.

So how can you actually find out who all these 98% of your online visitors are? How can you “talk” to them? The answer is simple: analyze and personalize!

The Gap In Online Marketing (Forgot The Anonymous Online Visitors?)

We already know that between 97% and 99% of a business’ online visitors remain anonymous. Yet, almost all marketers are focused on analyzing and converting the remaining 1-3% of the visitors that dare to contact the business. This is how they ignore such a big pool of potential buyers.

Inbound marketing, and content marketing, in particular, are so vastly used nowadays. Content is used as a tool to help customers educate themselves about the brand and its offerings (usually the brand raises awareness about a problem and offers ways to solve said problem). But there is something marketers neglect. And it’s the gap between the time when your audience finds you and the time they become known to you. An entire mid-funnel!

Why do you lose all these potential customers? You’re not giving them what they need and what they’re looking for. You try to alter your site and your content so that it can “speak” to all your visitors but that’s just not possible. All of us have different interests, lifestyle, needs and expectation. Believing one piece of content, one image, one CTA button will have the same effect over everyone is naive. Because we are all equal. Just different.

So how can we solve this problem? Real-time profiling and personalization is the way.

There are technologies that can help you understand better your online visitors – how old are they, what ethnic group they belong to, what’s their income, do they smoke, did they test for diabetes, even what political party they support. There are so many profiling characteristics to help you learn more about your potential buyers – you just need to pick them. Knowing this information about them will help you leverage what you have to offer and this way you’ll increase your chances of getting final consideration as they complete the buyer journey.

Setting Goals For Online Personalization

Personalization is a tool, after all, not a marketing strategy for you to pursue. It should serve your whole marketing strategy, but not form one. So when setting up goals about personalized content, think how they align with your overall objectives. Some examples here could be:

Getting more leads out of the same traffic

Understanding better your anonymous audience

Building profiles and segmentation groups based on info about the anonymous traffic

Optimizing content across all channels

Showing relevant content to each person landing on your website

Achieving better results when it comes to engagement, conversions, and sales

Better ROI

It’s important to set clear measurable goals so that you can track your progress, alter your approach if needed and aim even higher after that. Plan ahead and set expected ROI by taking into consideration your time and resources you’re going to invest in it.

Why do you need to tailor your content?

I recently had a talk with a friend of mine who is a designer. We talked about Adobe’s world famous software – Photoshop. A few years ago I was very interested in this tool and spent some time creating, altering and designing images. But my friend showed me the work he’s done recently with Photoshop and to be honest, I had no idea such marvelous things could be achieved with this tool.

This got me thinking that in this world of endless opportunities and possibilities, perhaps we often neglect things that are right in front of us because we’re not familiar with what this project, software, tool, person can help us with.

I think this is also relevant to content optimization. Why? Because just like in the example I gave, we don’t always recognize all the benefit we can get from a tool or an idea even. And yes, personalization has been around for a while. But according to an infographic from mobile marketing platform Kahuna and reported by Adweek, 48% of marketers struggle with personalization.

How To Choose a Personalization Tool?

When choosing a solution among the various ones on the market, look for those key characteristics:

Easy integration – You don’t want to change your whole business model just to fit personalization in it, do you?

Automated solution – You set it up and let it do its magic.

Insights and analytics – Important if you want to see in which direction you’re moving.

Real-time personalization – Because we live here and now and our needs change by the minute.

Diverse profiling characteristics – The more profiling characteristics you have, the more you can fine tune your content and strategy to fit everyone’s needs.

Following this train of thought, Adtailor was created out of a pure business need. Focused on the consumers’ interests and needs, it harnesses the power of big data to deliver a personalized experience to every online visitor. So why don’t you give it a try!